A morte: representações e significados nas urnas funerárias de Maracá. Identificação, descrição, análise e iconografia da Gruta da Caba e das coleções arqueológicas de Ferreira Penna e Lima Guedes

Abstract

Entering the imaginary of death is an arduous task, whatever the researcher or area of research, especially for those who intend to do so in extinct societies. However, delineating between the past and the present, we have tried to outline the social imaginary about death, from the material culture of a given society. This is the study of funerary urns called, due to historical ignorance, Maracá. As for the laboratory work, the morphological analysis was done, with emphasis on the identification, description, analysis and iconography of the pieces. As for the bibliographical reading and analysis, they focused on the association of the following themes: death and its meanings; the interaction of nature, society, and culture, in the light of Amerindian perspectivism; the phenomenon of death as being endowed with universality, collectivity, and individuality; the observation of material culture as revealing sociocultural contexts and presentations, that is, as a communication bias. The Maracá urns reveal to us an imbricated "web of meanings" current within the society that created them, where their complexities are explicit from the notorious intention of personifying the dead. As symbols and representations, imbued with sociocultural meanings, they allow us to know a little about the social, cultural, and cosmological organization of the society. Such results allow us to infer that death, as a universal phenomenon, has collective and particular repercussions, governed according to the culture that surrounds and shapes it. In an eternal attempt to explain or deal with the so-called natural phenomena that surround man and that so disturb his imagination, the dynamics of nature and culture are an inexhaustible source for human survival. However, Maracá's research is far from being conclusive, allowing us only to gather data and, based on them, formulate some hypotheses, albeit initial ones.